Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday November 24, 2010 @08:12AM
from the now-you-can-rage-on-ios-instead-of-at-it dept.

Vigile writes "RAGE from id Software for iOS devices is finally available and has been tested over at PC Perspective. The game obviously looks impressive with a nearly 750MB download (and about double that when uncompressed) and not much else can rival it on the platform. The game itself is a rail-based shooter, making the touchscreen interface more intuitive and less cumbersome but it does take away some of the feeling of control in the game. Video of the game running is also included in the short review."

I agree that the HD in the name is unfortunate since it's usually the name given to iPad software, but there's very little difference in the number of pixels in an iPhone4 (960x640@326dpi) vs an iPad (1024x768@132dpi) so it's not exactly false advertising.

Personally I think the "on rails" comment is comparing it to the tech demo that the Unreal team recently did where you walked around an outdoor castle/town environment with full range of motion. There was no "game" yet, but it was an impressive display of

No, the "on rails" comment refers to the fact that it's a shooter where you can aim and dodge, but movement is controlled by the game. You're moved into position, you shoot everything that moves, and then you're taken to the next position. Repeat as needed. Rinse.

Think of a shoot-em-up video arcade game like Time Crisis or House of the Dead.

On the xbox titles I worked on, we always synchronously loaded sections of the maps to create seamless worlds. Well, up to a point anyway.

You'd normally have some obviously placed dog-legs in the levels.... a.k.a. a section in the map where you make the player go down a twisty passage from which you can't see the next section of the level (that's being loaded), and can't see the part of the level you just came from (which is being unloaded).

There were 2 critical drawbacks with this engine. One was the pallete of colors. Most people complained about Quakes dull, brown, gray, blue and beige colors, without knowing that it was the only solution for archieving lighting over surfaces. Since each material needs a wide variety of reserved colors for displaying darkened/brightened portions of the surface, the game was limited to just a few colors and all their respective shades. This was when 8-bit displays (just 256 colors) ruled the Earth, and superior color depths were impossible for the mainstream video equipment.

Quake didn't have a lighting engine, it only used precompiled lightmaps

Quake could handle dynamic light sources just fine, shoot a rocket through a corridor and things would light up. It had static lightmaps in addition to that. One limitation was that it couldn't handle colored light sources, those came in Quake2.

and any use of a limited set of colours was not a technical limit of the engine.

If you are working with only 256 colors you have to limit your palette, as each logical color needs multiple shades in the palette.

What I don't get is why it's called Rage HD being an iPhone game... low-res = HD? Even the iPad's resolution is meh

It's a silly naming convention people call iPad and iPhone4 (with retina support) apps. It's not high-def, just like HD Radio is not high-def (it's "hybrid digital" because it uses subcarriers on the analog FM channel). It is, though "higher definition". Other app developers use "XL" and "for iPad" to differentiate.

There are three standard resolutions to iOS - HVGA (320x480), DVGA (double VGA,

Got it when it was released and played some on a plane(itouch 4) and it takes a little while to get to us to the control, and you look like you are have some problems while playing.
Part of learning the controls is the accuracy, since the aim point says in the center of the screen you have to move around to kill the target. I would not switch my Keyboard/mouse for this but for a handheld solo player game it works alot better then some FPS on the iOS that have seperate move controls.

it's usually not fast enough, also it makes playing cumbersome, impossible if sitting in a car, if sitting in a funny position. there's not one big hit game that used it but it's been floated around forever as controlling scheme.

but I don't get the big fuss about RAGE.. sure, it takes good advantage of the hw.. but shows nothing that wasn't known as possible and gameplay is just a rails shooter? and 750mb for a low amount of levels? did they pre-calculate everything? if it were a wii game nobody would care

The accelerometers are pretty good (for such small units), but actually controlling them by hand is tricky.

There's a game called MB Lander that uses them in exactly the way you'd expect - you tilt and turn the iPhone to power the various thrusters and the main engine on a moon landing craft, with realistic physics affecting the craft. It is pretty difficult to control accurately, since tiny corrections can have a large impact. I can't imagine how hard it would be to control an FPS like this, unless you soft

Not that I'm unhappy for the IOS users... but I hope the pc version ships soon. The QuakeCon coverage of it had me drooling. Carmack is pretty excited with mobile development at the moment though, so I understand why he released it on IOS first.

Uh what? There is no "full iPhone game to come". Carmack clearly stated that it wasn't their intention (or even possible) to release the Rage game we'll be seeing on PC/XBox 360/PS3 as iOS game. Also, no other Rage title than this has been announced or spoken of.

Now that Rage: Mutant Bash TV has landed on the App Store, id Software's John Carmack is already talking about what's next for the developer on Apple's iOS platform: more Rage. Specifically, a game focusing on the driving aspect of Rage on consoles and PC (shown in the above screenshot).

"I think we have a really good idea of what we can do in this format, and I'm really excited about getting onto the next game, getting onto what we can do with another slice of Rage," C

Gorgeous graphics or not, is anybody actually still interested in rail shooters? I thought they went out of style about 10 years ago.
I'll grant you that FPS are rather awkward on these devices when implemented with on-screen controls, but seems to me that there's even less room for innovation in this genre than in FPS. Is there anything gameplay-wise here that we haven't experienced before?

Is there anything gameplay-wise here that we haven't experienced before?

You're missing the point. This is on an iPhone. Think of it from the point of view of an Apple fanboi. It's on an iPhone! Certainly falls into the category "stuff that matters" when you put it that way!

There have been decent rail-shooters in recent years which have, I think, proved that there's still some life in the genre.

Dead Space: Extraction, originally for the Wii but now with a PS3 (Move-compatible) port coming alongside Dead Space 2 is one of the real neglected gems of the last few years. It's a rail shooter that defies many of the conventions of the genre by requiring a dose of thought. You have to plan your weapons loadout and ammunition consumption quite carefully. It's also quite demanding of y

Well, they are a niche genre for sure, but if done well, they can still be interesting today and actually are kinda coming back again a little.

I think the wave of motion-control systems for consoles played a big part in it, starting with the Wii. Because the Wiimote could essentially be used quite nicely as a modern lightgun system and was standard issue on all Wii consoles, games like House of the Dead: Overkill or Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii were made as rail shooters and now with the Playstatio

It is a clever way to get around the fact that FPS games are ridiculously clumsy on iOS. Rail shooters were replaced by FPS games about a decade ago with the use of mouselook. No mouselook on iOS means we need to rethink what games are made for the device. Try Nova or EliminatePro for iTouch/Phone/Pad, those FPS games have controls which are much less precise than a console gamepad which is much less precise than mouselook.
If you were the developer given a hugely detailed first person environment but w

The game is very impressive from a texture and polygon perspective, but I am getting progressively sicker of this massively dull pallet being used in games. It seems if there aren't magical powers (BioShock, Mass Effect) all the color in the world goes away (Fallout, Gears of War, Rage).

I wasn't always like this, but as time goes on, I like environments to be realistic & attractive. I am sick of wandering around in worlds that are just plain ugly. Impressive, realistic, but ugly.

Grand Theft Auto for the iPad is some 600 megs. It could have been more but they didn't use full motion cut scenes like they do on their bigger console-based cousins. The lady routinely buys these Myst-like games that are around 500mb.

750mb ain't much for a good game provided you play it enough. Plus the trick is to buy them in iTunes on your PC and just sync them up to the I*.

Actually an app of that size can only be downloaded over Wifi, you can buy it over the cell network but if over a certain size (last I saw it was 30MB) your download will wait for you to get home or work.

If you compare it to computers from a few years back that were sporting similar hard drive capacities, it doesn't seem that unusual. In fact, looking at some of the games, it seems like a downright bargain. For instance, Myst is currently 533MB on the iPhone (it was 727MB when it was first released), and that game is from 1993. I shudder to think how much it would have taken up, as a percentage of a standard HDD, in that day and age.

The size is going to be mostly textures, sounds, models, etc. The binary itself cannot be shared across applications, but it's going to be fairly small. Third parties cannot install a 'shared object' or 'DLL' on iOS.

Take any game you can find on the market, you'll have 20 megs of code if they included your moms kitchen sink and gigs of media such as sound, textures, models, levels and so on that actually make up the game.

On the iPad it's a stunning tech demo. But at 3 short levels, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a game.

Why not? My first experience with the game left me feeling that it's pretty shallow. I even noted how for all it's graphic splendor it's nowhere near as compelling as angry birds or cut the rope.

I still think that's true, but when i played it again i found i actually did kind of like it. There is a bit of strategy to selecting the right gun. I realized i wasn't good at getting the ammo pickups and it would be beneficial to picking off as many easy guys as possible with the handgun. It helps to pay attenti

Carmack's primary interest in game development has always been graphics related. And that is perfectly fine as far as an individual developer is concerned. After all, that is what set Wolf3D and Doom apart were the visuals. In actuality they are pure 2D games, and can be played purely from a 2D top-down perspective as there aren't any vertical aiming or other height elements. Yet all that mattered in that day and age were the visuals, so the games were stunning successes.

Quake brought the rest of the game engine totally up to par, in that it was a true 3D experience with 6 degrees of freedom.

What seems to be happening with id on iOS is a more extreme version of what Wolf3D and Doom were, which is primarily a visual experience. It's a shame that id cannot figure out how to couple the graphical side with some decent game play. I seem to hear gamers often lamenting that gameplay elements have staled for many years now, which is perhaps why the Wii (and likely Kinect) are such a success - they bring new gameplay elements (and ironically, Wii is a step backwards visually, yet it was still a huge success).

I think id needs a developer matching Carmack's talent and drive but in game design. Then instead of to trying to render a first person 3D scene as realistically as possible, and then after the fact retrofit it into a game, it can be developed from the ground up so the rendering and gameplay complement one another.

The iOS game is obviously just a tech demo, probably something to keep Carmack busy. But RAGE itself is nothing like that.

It has been seven years since Doom 3 was released. The RAGE engine was pretty much finished 3 years ago, and they still don't plan to ship until September of next year. RAGE has had a much longer development cycle than any other id game simply because they are spending so much time on content. They are taking gameplay seriously this time around, and they are sacrificing their core capabi

What set Doom apart wasn't just the visuals, it was how immersive the world was. There were other Doom engine based games that came out after Doom that were NOT nearly as good(Heretic was pretty damn close though).

No it was the visuals. There was no plot to Doom except what the manual stated on the first page. The game was simply the best looking game on the market and you ran around shooting monsters, that was it. You know what game came out 7 days before Doom that had a plot but more cartoonist style graphics? Blake Stone from Apogee and it was destroyed by Doom. Even when Doom 2 came out it was still the same game but with about 10 new enemies and one new gun but it was still the best looking game out there.

I don't understand your point -- to a game like Doom, what does plot matter? That's like berating Tetris for its lack of plot, or saying that the newest TD game just didn't motivate you, or that Minecraft lacked good characters. Ultimately, they're just games. Some games benefit from a great plot, some games do better with no plot at all!

Doom was a great game because it had good controls (for the time), great gameplay, humor, environment, and yes, great graphics for its time. You can't just boil that down a

You obviously haven't played Rage on iOS. Otherwise you'd realise that it's every bit as good a game as any Wii title. Now, I do think that games like Wolfenstein and Doom have aged ungracefully and I really hated Doom 3 and found it monotonous and tiresome, but Rage for iOS is actually a pretty fun and well thought-out mini game.

I grabbed this for my iPhone recently. The size may be excessive, but they're using some very high quality art assets, and have a variety of levels (I'm not sure how many).

I've always been extremely skeptical about first person games being playable on the iPhone, but I think id totally nailed this one. It works well not because they found a good way for you to control your movement and view, but because they took movement out of the equation. The "on rails" style like the old arcade shooters with the pla

Epic Games has a pretty impressive 3D demo on the app store (free i believe). I only tried it on the the iPad but I think you can get it on other platforms. I heard they are making a game based on the sample world the demo has, which I think can certainly rival Rage (on iOS, anyways)